Fruit Flies

Now has come the time of gray days and wet days and leaves falling everywhere.  It’s hard to get anything done if I’m in a room with a window because the falling leaves constantly distract me: ‘What was that over there in my peripheral vision?  Oh, another leaf falling.’  Since there are about 3 million leaves fairly close outside the house, this can be more than a little repetitive as each one makes its way groundward, and as it goes, requires me to acknowledge its presence.  If I really need to get something done, I have to keep the curtains closed, which only increases the overall darkness.

Also, it is the twilight time of the apple and pear and plum abundance.  They ripen and fall off the tree, perfect, ready to be eaten; but inside the house there are yet all their siblings that fell off the tree yesterday and the day before, and we just can’t eat them fast enough.  And thus do the fruit flies come to join us in the despairing activity of hovering over the fruit.  I’ve eaten and frozen lots of plums and lots of applesauce, but yet there are plums and apples.  I don’t believe one can freeze pears (or at least can’t imagine the outcome), so the excess just goes bad quickly and is almost wept over.  Perfectly wonderful pears going bad: that can’t be the sign of a well-planned or well-lived life.

The apples are the most likely to be rescued because George and Rose invite us over to a grand apple juicing evening with their beautiful apple press and their excess apples and their hovering fruit flies.  We spent such an evening a couple of weeks ago and came home with six half-gallons of fresh apple juice.  The evening’s full haul was 35 half-gallons, and about half of that went to the food bank.  Of course, we can no more drink up six half-gallons of fresh apple juice than we can consume all those excess pears, but the freezer has a tall shelf that accepts what cannot be drunk immediately.  And all through the dark season to come, we will be slowly allotting  that juice into our eager cups, and remembering October.  And thanking Rose and George.